"High Noon" For Bushco In Iraq

This is one of those “trying to bring order to chaos” posts of mine (seems to be a full time job anymore).

David Swanson of the group After Downing Street reported today on another “Downing Street” type memo which states that it was a foregone conclusion for Bushco that they were going to invade Iraq as of February 2002, and this one originated from the Australian Wheat Board.

As Swanson asked, “Why are we hearing about this now”? Here’s the answer:

“…the minutes have been released by a government investigation into AWB's bribing of Saddam Hussein's government in order to win contracts to export Australian wheat to Iraq. That investigation may now be expanded in Australia. It's also one that the incoming Democratic chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committees in the U.S. committed last week to investigating. What will they do now, with the wheat bribe scandal having taken this interesting twist?”

And as the link to the article in “The Age” notes…

“(The Democrats) claim the Republican Party went soft on the prior investigation as ‘pay-off’ in exchange for Prime Minister John Howard sending Australian troops to Iraq, The Australian reports.”

This is an important development, but I don’t think it’s too earth shattering of a revelation that Bushco wanted to invade Iraq at this point (I’ve read that they wanted to go in much earlier, before 9/11 in fact, though I don’t have a link to support that at the moment).

This link to an article on the World Socialist Web Site may have seemed like alarmist agit-prop around February 2002, about the same time frame that AWB chairman Trevor Flugge informed John Dauth, who was Australia’s UN ambassador at that time, of Bushco’s intentions in Iraq, but now I would say that the WSWS article was highly prescient, especially since I think the only way to describe Iraq now is to call it a bloodbath.

Why any sane person would still be debating about whether or not a civil war is currently going on is something I cannot possibly understand. I also believe it is an act of utter madness for our government to not address the U.N. Security Council at this point and say that international intervention is required to try and stabilize the region and prevent the war from escalating.

After the most recent events in Iraq, this may truly be the “point of no return” on the question of a wider regional conflict.

And as far as I’m concerned, this brings us back to the question of impeachment.

I should have saved this link since I can’t find it now (I have trouble with this stuff on The Daily Kos), but I read Markos Moulitsas making disparaging remarks the other day about the “impeach Bush” crowd, arguing that Cheney would be worse (assuming he’s not the de facto president anyway) and that we should concentrate on helping Democrats through the electoral process instead. I think focusing on elections versus hearings is wise also, but it’s wrong to automatically disqualify impeachment as an option for purposes of political pragmatism.

What to do, then?

I think this other post from The Daily Kos makes a lot of sense (and by the way, even though it seems to be arguing against impeachment, I agree with its methodology – it states that Congress should build the case gradually and let the facts dictate where the investigations should go, and we should be there to report on what happens; you would think Congress would do this anyway, but it’s easy for investigations to get poisoned through partisanship, and that's why we need to be the gatekeepers).

And buried further down in the comments is a link to another post by Billmon which gives some direction for John Conyers, John Dingell, Henry Waxman, and other Democrats running committees that could be part of ongoing investigations.

When it comes to the subject of impeachment with Bushco, I think of The Old West, and I consider it the loaded .45 sitting on the table in a bar when playing poker with a bunch of card cheats. If they dealt from the bottom of the deck or slipped in an extra ace somewhere, they knew they could get a bullet in the belly. At the very least, it should be an omnipresent threat. And the chamber should NEVER be emptied.

Iraq is but one of many messes (though the biggest one) created by this bunch for which they must be must be held accountable.